Data USA — Visualization of free public data — MIT

Website makes government data easier to find

Steve Lohr writes: “For years, the federal government, states, and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public. A project coming out of the MIT Media Lab seeks to harness that data and make it available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as ‘the most comprehensive visualization of US public data.’ It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.”…

New York Times, Apr. 4DATA USA

Open Access Coalition

Today Kansas and 21 other
universities and colleges announced that they’re joining forces to form the
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi. The new group will
“collaborate and share implementation strategies, and advocate on a national
level,” it said in a
 statement. 

 

Read more: http://bit.ly/p8A9eo

Source:  Trevor Dawes, Circulation Services Director, Princeton Univ.

MIT’s open access policy supported by scholarly publishers

"Scholarly publishers confirm support for MIT’s open access policy – 22 Mar 2010

The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced that a year after the faculty adopted a policy to open access to their scholarly articles, many scholarly publishers have confirmed their support. More than 850 articles have been added to the MIT Open Access articles collection in the MIT Libraries’ digital repository, DSpace@MIT, where they are freely available on the web.

Publishers who are supporting the MIT policy include American Economic Association, American Institute of Physics, American Mathematical Society, Beilstein-Institut, BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), The Optical Society of America (OSA), Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the University of California Press, among others. Many of these publishers allow the MIT Libraries to capture copies of the final published PDF for deposit, so that authors do not need to take any action in order to have their articles openly accessible.

In a move aimed at broadening access to the institution’s research and scholarship, MIT faculty, in March 2009, voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the web. The MIT Libraries, with the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, continue to work with MIT faculty to help further the policy’s goal of broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship.

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Source: Knowledgespeak Newletter 3/22/10

MIT Labs have developed a “Sixth Sense”

From the TED (Technology, Entertainment , Design) site:

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.

Pranav Mistry is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.

Take a look at TED, too.  Efforts began in 1984 to share earth-shaking ideas at a conference in Long Beach, CA.  The best talks and performances are  freely available to view.  One can subscribe to the TED series.

 

MIT Faculty votes for open access to scholarly articles

 MIT faculty votes for open access to their scholarly articles – 24 Mar 2009

The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, has voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web. The move is aimed at broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship.

The new policy was approved unanimously at a recently held MIT faculty meeting and took immediate effect. Under the new policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace, an open-source software platform developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard. The policy gives MIT and its faculty the right to use and share the articles for any purpose other than to make a profit. Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.

MIT’s DSpace repository contains the digital research materials of MIT faculty and researchers and allows them to be saved, searched and shared worldwide. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was launched in 2001 with the goal of making all MIT course materials available, free of charge, to anyone over the World Wide Web. Since then, OCW has shared MIT course materials with more than 50 million visitors worldwide and inspired hundreds of other universities to do the same. The new open access resolution will now remove barriers to making all of MIT’s research openly available to the world.

A faculty committee will work with the MIT Libraries to oversee implementation and determine a workflow for adding articles to DSpace. Under the new open access model, potentially thousands of papers published by MIT faculty each year will be added to DSpace and made freely available on the web and accessible through search engines such as Google.

MIT’s policy claims to be the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the US. While Harvard and Stanford universities have implemented open access mandates at some of their schools, MIT is the first to fully implement the policy university-wide as a result of a faculty vote. MIT’s resolution is built on similar language adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

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